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Nuclear winter before this winter?
Back triumphantly from New York,
the prime minister’s adhoc speech making at the airport reception by his bhakts
led to massive traffic snarls across western Delhi. The road show was justified
by Narendra Modi getting the better of Imran Khan ‘Niazi’. Khan’s full name was
eked out by a young Indian diplomat preparing her rejoinder to Khan’s ‘rant’ on
Kashmir at his turn at the podium at the General Assembly.
While in the United States (US), Modi
had instead expended his ammunition at the Rs. 1.4 lakh crore Howdy Modi show.
(Disclosure: this author could not work out the number of zeros in that figure.
Evidently, Rahul Gandhi, who dug up the dirt, knows better.) The highlight was
his overtly interfering in the elections of the host country by endorsing the
bid for reelection of its sitting president, currently under impeachment
proceedings. That bit of personal diplomacy was taken as getting the US
alongside, though Trump carefully pointed out that talks were the way forward
for both sides.
The easy-to-manufacture consensus
in India is that India has won. However, India’s national security minders know
better. National Security Adviser Ajit Doval was over in Srinagar yet again
last week keeping up the vigil. He best knows – hopefully – that only the first
round is over. He informed on the second round when he spotted several hundred
jihadis across the Line of Control (LC). The army chief, obediently on cue, got
himself photographed peering through a telescope across the LC. The bell for
the second round tolled with kinetic operations in the hinterland taking a toll
of six militants.
Round One extracted a
reputational price internationally - which the Indian media’s ostrich act has
kept from the public. So it was not a walkover. As for Round Two, there are two
dimensions. The first is the eruption in Kashmir. The continuing lock down is a
dead give-away. If Amit Shah is to be believed there is no such lock down any
more. But then to Amit Shah till only recently Farooque Abdullah was a free
man. The second is the manner Pakistan lobs the Kashmir ball back into India’s
court.
Pakistan’s army appears to have
instructed its puppet and purported civilian political master, Imran Khan, to
create the conditions for their actions in Round Two. Khan led the diplomatic
offensive with as much vigour as he had brought to the cricketing oval when his
team won the world cup. India did well not to shoot itself in the foot by
shooting up Kashmiris, preferring instead to take the hit over a lock down.
Even so, Imran Khan has given the Pakistan military an alibi. He has warned the
international community adequately and if it has not taken vigourous preventive
action, then it would have to be goaded into action with development of a
threat to international peace and security in Round Two.
There are three possibilities.
One is resumption of proxy war with gusto, and, second, to up the ante with a
conventional show of force. The third is Pakistan going Gandhian.
The first possibility is
apparently already in the works. The second may be necessary as overlay since
the Indian military is ready and waiting. The Pakistan army would reckon that
military force is to be used to protect and further its national interest. Since
Kashmir is equated with the national interest – the military reputedly controls
Pakistan’s Kashmir, India, Afghanistan and nuclear policies – it cannot be that
it would go Gandhian at the crunch. On returning from New York, Imran Khan more
or less conceded defeat, acknowledging that the jihad doctrine required
standing by Kashmiris, giving the green light for possibilities one and two.
Instead, India appears to have
betted on a third possibility: Pakistan, overawed by surgical strikes, going
Gandhian. Strategic good sense would indeed be to survey the preparedness and
power equations and step back, using proxies to face the music – as has largely
been the case thus far. It could do this and get away earlier since it could
justify proxy war as pressure to get India to talk. By India closing the option
of talks decisively – saying talks will be over terror and Pakistan occupied
Kashmir and making Kashmir inaccessible through (un)constitutional
‘integration’ – proxy war loses its earlier rationale. India has forced
Pakistan to do more, foregrounding the second possibility.
As for the third, for India to
expect a cake walk in Round Two is not unreasonable. Pakistan should know that
its economy cannot sustain the ten day war India’s military preparedness can –
even if India’s economic down turn precludes India sustaining a war of any
duration. Pakistan is also on the cusp of black listing on its terror financing
record. Pakistan could also lose the war and its army its position on the top
of Pakistan’s power heap.
By winter, Round Two would have
either finished or fizzled. It would be apparent what risk India has had to run
over implementing a manifesto promise of the Bharatiya Janata Party. Such
promises are to be checked by instruments of state by providing a reality check.
Those institutions on the front rank of national security have to temper, deter
and push back on policy missteps. If the government was warned of the risk of
war is not known. That no one has resigned indicates group think.
Since there are no inducements to
Pakistan on offer as part of a deterrence-reassurance strategy, it is not
self-evident how the first two possibilities will be avoided. The army chief in
his interview yesterday is out justifying a policy which - even if disaster is
avoided in the short term - is not going to see a let up in the situation for
another generation. He suggests that the shift to surgical strikes will ensure
the third possibility, and if it does not, India will be at it till it does. It
is anyone guess how long will that be, at what risk and with what efficacy.
This is evidence that just as with other national institutions the Indian
military is also hollowed out – unable to stand up to the media-built strategic
reputation of their political master, the unelected Ajit Doval.
To highlight this here is not to
reprise Im-the-dim Khan. India’s actions speak of an agreement with Imran Khan
that it is running an undue risk. The lock down – self-inflicted clampdown
according to General Rawat - in Kashmir is set to continue through winter as
rumours of the paramilitary inducted in additional numbers is now seeking
winter accommodation indicate. India has put out several deterrent gambits,
such as, its defence minister reminding Pakistan of its past losses in wars and
its standing to lose Pakistan Occupied Kashmir. His reference to a shaky
nuclear first use pledge is proof of India’s concurrence with Khan that there
is a more than just a nuclear backdrop to war today.
In a book, India’s Habituation
with the Bomb, released at a Pakistani security think tank last week, I make
the case in my book chapter contribution, ‘India’s Nuclear Doctrine: Dynamism
or Stasis’, that India’s is now a warfighting nuclear doctrine – how so ever
much its declaratory nuclear doctrine dissimulates to the contrary. This makes
India more war prone than during its years of strategic restraint. It permits the
shift to strategic proactivism of late. Ability and intent to match Pakistani
nuclear use in war with its own at an early and low threshold mode makes India
venturesome. Others have it that India may even preempt Pakistani nuclear use.
This explains the military’s confidence in backing of the constitutional
jugglery over Kashmir and belief that it can face down Pakistan. With a more
usable Indian nuclear arsenal on call, Pakistan would be better deterred from
going nuclear. Without the nuclear assurance behind it, the Pakistani army
would be less liable to be adventurous over the Kashmir fait accompli. Any
Pakistani poser over Kashmir can then be check mated by Indian conventional
resort. Any Pakistan nuclear proclivity can be met with proportionate nuclear
riposte. In short, a fightable nuclear war keeps Pakistan in better check.
In the present situation, the
Indian assessment is that the worst case – of nuclear exchange(s) - can be
ridden out. It’s a risk worth running for the national interest of a quiescent
Kashmir. Since there can be no more fraught a situation than the current on
over Kashmir, the hope is General Rawat is proven right. He has it that
Pakistan cannot rely on its nuclear deterrent since doing so would be against
the tenets of strategic weapons use. Hope General Rawat does not believe his
deterrence propaganda. In case he is proven wrong, the only silver lining is
that accountability shall catch up with the trio – Modi-Shah-Doval - that
pushed South Asia into such a situation in first place.
